The Digital Zibaldone is a project dedicated to remediating the intellectual notebook (Zibaldone of Thoughts) of the 19^th century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi as a digital editing environment. The project’s aim is twofold: 1) to build a research platform for a semantic digital edition of Leopardi’s collection of research fragments; 2) to address the challenges of discourse organization of the fragment genre through methods for digital representation and analysis. 

Although the Italian term zibaldone refers to the scholarly practice of commonplace books, Leopardi’s text belongs to the modern genre of authorial collections of research fragments which do include citations from readings and bibliographic references but for the most part consist of original reflections towards publications projects that were never completed (other prominent representatives include the notebooks of Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk). These personal research archives often contain copious annotations for their semantic organization. Thus, Leopardi’s Zibaldone is marked with several thousand references linking the fragments and several thematic indexes with over a thousand headings containing circa ten thousand references. Given the sheer volume of the text (4,526 manuscript pages), the number of references, and the network structure of the interconnections they form, navigating the fragments according to the semantic order implicit in these authorial annotations becomes unfeasible in print. A digital environment would respond to the mediatic and cognitive challenges that readers confront in reconstructing the hermeneutic discourse of the notebook and give insight into Leopardi’s scholarly methods. Similarly, reconstructing the intellectual matrix of the text through its extensive references to works, authors, historical and fictional persons, would benefit from semantic methods for digital editing such as XML-TEI, ontologies, linked data, and knowledge visualization. 

The current web interface of the Digital Zibaldone is based on the XML-TEI encoding of the text, which identifies semantic units (date divisions, paragraphs, additions), content elements (persons, places, works, languages, quotes, emphatic underlining), and link references, and thereby allows to interconnect the fragments within the manuscript, to link them to the indexes, and to run semantic queries relating these elements together. The persons, titles of work, and places are furthermore transformed into linked data augmented through authority files, which allows to gain a comprehensive perspective of Leopardi’s intellectual interlocuters and thematic contexts. Semantic ontologies for the intra-textual references and the indexes further define the network structure of relations between the fragments based on semantic values embedded in the formal features of the manuscript, such as target granularity of the references, position of the reference on the page, different levels of specificity of the index headings, etc. Eventually, the research platform will enable readers to collectively augment the scholarly analysis of the text by adding analytical annotations on individual fragments and on its extensive critical bibliography in order to enable its dynamic contextualization. Aggregate representations of the collection’s relational structure through network graphs and statistical charts aim to support and sustain the fragment genre’s epistemic method of gaining momentary vantage points to observe phenomena as a constellation of relations.